Changes

In Barrabus Madzimure is about to die, stranded on a mining planet millions of light-years from home, executed for high crimes against the year 2102Church, mankind has discovered the secret ruling body of eternal lifeEarth. Human souls can be moved from one Except he's not Barrabus Madzimure, he's Thaniel Kilraven in Barrabus Madzimure's body to another through . Such is the process known as transference. Control magic of this new technology has fallen under Transference, the dominion of Jovian—a powerful prophet ability to transplant a person's soul or consciousness into a different body - and head of a power that the Church which governs every aspect of existencehas exclusive control over. Banished As if Thaniel doesn't have enough things to worry about, a mining colony on Church employee named Corvus has arrived from Earth to interrogate him. All Thaniel wants is to see his family again, and he'll stop at nothing to accomplish this, but the Church isn't going to give in without a distant planet for lawlessness is Barrabas Madzimure—the king hell of thievesa fight. Only when Barrabas faces execution does he claim that another man committed his infamous crimes decades earlier. The authorities are suspicious. Is he the Madzimure of legend, or just another victim of transference?

The setting of the book seems a little like your standard space opera setting, although with some more interesting elements thrown in. In the aftermath of "the wars", the old world was all but destroyed, which allowed the Church to rise to power. New York City is now known as Neo York, presumably because it had to be almost entirely rebuilt. There are mentions of conflicts between people living in the various cities and the "nonurbanites", who refuse to submit to the Church. The Transference technology is very thoroughly explored, specifically the link between the body and the soul and the identity issues arising from people waking up in an entirely different body. Also, the Church has exclusive control over this technology, with everyone being forced to have their consciousness transferred into a new body at age 18, and feeds the population lies about them being the ones to first discover the technology. All in all, it is a rather sobering exploration of how a technology as revolutionary as transference can be abused by those at the height of society. The universe also has a method of Faster Than Light travel which honestly seems a little underutilised. While admittedly it is still a very new technology, the fact that the Church has managed to set up a mining colony on a planet 47 million light years away but not on some of the closer star systems (e.g. Proxima Centauri) does seem a little strange to me. It is mentioned in the book that Eridanium, the mineral that powers transference, can only be found here and Jovian does have some other motivations for settling the planet, so I guess that does explain it somewhat.